@iWestminster asked me a while ago what my Feedburner Settings were. I decided to save this post after I hit the big 1,000 RSS Subscribers mark (learn how I did it here).
So, here is a pictorial walkthru of what my settings look like. I’ll explain a bit as well my decision making process.
Ready? Here we gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Analyze Settings
As you can see from the above picture there’s not much to do in the “Analyze” section. Just make sure you’ve clicked all the “Configure Stats” options to capture as much data as possible:
I personally do not use any of the Headline Animator Stats because I think the options are pretty lame looking. Personal opinion here. You can always calculate hits on links from other sites to your feed through one of your analytics packages.
Optimize Settings
As you can see, the first setting that you should definitely enable is the BroswerFriendly option and then max it out.
One thing that I know a few people do is have a little nice message to their readers every once in a while. I currently do not have this active, but I’ve heard of people using this area for RSS Subscriber-specific initiatives and marketing programs.
For example, you could run a contest that would only be visible to those that actually subscribed, perhaps to thank them for subscribing, etc.
I haven’t done anything like that (but have thought about it) but have not implemented anything. But my bottom line is that I’d rather have them read the blog post content and not my pithy statements all the time. Again, personal preference.
The next area is Smart Feed which is an obvious no brainer. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t have this active at all.
Feed Flare is something that can get wildly out of control very quickly. As you can see, I’ve chosen only 6, and this is because of a few things.
First, I don’t want the “flare” at the end of the post to look all nasty with 1,000 different options. Two, there’s a good chance that someone may be viewing the feed in a reader that doesn’t have much screen width, so I want to make sure it doesn’t jump down a line and look “cramped.” Thirdly, clickthrus on these have been so poor that it’s best to keep it reasonable here and not consider it a big deal. Finally, I don’t have it on my site because I don’t want it to break my styling: Feedburner is great at feeds, not on blog styling. Keeping it real here.
As you can see, I don’t do Link, Photo, or Geotagging because I simply do not want to “bloat” my RSS Subscribers experience. Also, I want them ultimately to click through to comment or interact with my post, and not distract them with “other alternatives” like photos or other links.
Keep them on the post and you’ll streamline the experience (and the clicks).
Feed Image Burner is a great addition because it adds personality and my brand feel to the feed.
As you can see, I’ve added one of the little 125×125 pixel squares as the link and added the link title accordingly. Here are the settings and also what it looks like.
Make sure it’s not bigger than 144 pixels tall or wide.
The Title/Description Burner is also pretty basic and is another no-brainer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen RSS Feeds that have no title, no description, and no author. That’s bogus!
I do not use Convert Format Burner because it would interfere with Smart Feed and the biggest pet peeve I have is people who actually use the Summary Burner.
I think this is the lamest idea ever. Please give your readers the FULL CONTENT FEED and not just an excerpt. That is inconsiderate and super lame. By forcing users to click-thru you do a disservice to them. Stop the hate.
Publicize Settings
As you can see I use a lot of these settings, and so should you.
BuzzBoost is an simple RSS Widget that I’ve deployed on some other properties to drive extra traffic. This is especially useful for sites that don’t have a built in RSS Widget (like WordPress) and are more static in nature.
Email Subscriptions are also very valuable and I have a number of daily email subscribers that enjoy reading my content in email fashion. I couldn’t imagine why you wouldn’t offer this to your readers.
So, you should definitely either have the copy-and-paste widget code or build the link yourself.
I also have checked the box to get notified when someone unsubscribes. I always email them personally, thanking them for their original subscription as well as ask if they have any advice to discover their reasoning behind the unsubscription. I’ve gotten some great responses and answers by doing this.
In addition, I’ve customized the Communication Preferences with a message that is specific to my blog, instead of the standard copy. Personalization works, trust me.
I’ve also spent a few minutes doing some Email Branding with the same logo that I drop into the RSS Feed.
It’s easy to do and is a “visual cue” so that when the see the logo in their Email Subscription they know that what they are about to read is sheer blog post genius and pure awesomeness.
My Email Delivery Options have changed over time as I’ve adjust my blogging schedule and pattern.
The reason I deliver it at the time that I do is because I’m on the East Coast and typically try to get the first blog post of the new day out by 8:00 am.
By sending out the email in that time window I can make sure that I have at least one new blog post that’ll go out with the Email Subscription, because there’s a chance that they already had read all of the posts of the previous day (either by visiting the site directly or through RSS).
I want to guarantee that they have at least something new to read, which will remind them how awesome ChurchCrunch is.
PingShot simply adds an additional level of “instantaneous” to your blog post syndication.
By letting PingShot “ping” the services, it enables quicker notification that you do, in fact, have a new blog post ready to be consumed by the masses.
There’s really no reason why you wouldn’t have this enabled.
FeedCount, I feel, is pretty important.
You can actually read more of my thoughts here on whether or not you should show this chicklet on your blog.
Make sure you color coordinate to make it pretty!
I have the Awareness API turned on so that other services can take advantage of my feed and use it. This doesn’t mean that I’ve given content-scrappers permission because they can just grab my feed with a few clicks of the mouse. This enables developers who are building applications to utilize my feed for typically useful purposes.
Just like I’m doing with YahooPipes! on the Community Blog Feed. If I wanted to do some really cool stuff with your feed, first thing that you’d do is thank me for using it (and syndicating your content) and secondly you’d get more traffic and yummy goodness (more thanks are welcome).
I used to have Creative Commons active on my feeds until I realized that it broke some of the feed readers out there as well as messed with some of the formatting and text.
I’ve since turned it off to maximize content delivery. You are more than welcome to have this on, but for me I’m leaving it off until they update their delivery system.
The NoIndex setting is not so important anymore as many of the major search engines do not index your feeds now. But, I keep this active just in case some old legacy engines are being used and for the newer ones that may change as protocol changes.
I also turn on YahooPipes! usage, because that’s just cool.
Finally, I do not currently Monetize my RSS Feed through Google Ads.
Check and Validate Often
One final note that cannot be taken lightly is that you need to check and validate your feed weekly (if not daily). I’m super anal about my feed being syndicated and content being published effectively.
If your feed doesn’t validate it can often mean that you’re feed isn’t being delivered. That’s a terrible problem to have.
New WordPress themes, plugins, change in content (media) can all do “wierd” and “fantastically interesting” things to your RSS feed, so get to know your feed as best as you can.
Thankfully, I’ve had an amazing community that has helped me become aware when my feed does not serve up the content. I love that about the ChurchCrunch Community!
I’ve had to go nuclear on more than one occasion… hopefully you won’t have to…!
Do you have any additional tips, tricks, or experience that I should know to increase my RSS Feedburner Ninja Skills?
Wow – this is the best post you have ever done. Thanks so much. I love all the step-by-step instructions, that’s what I need.
Hope this post quickly brings you to 2000 RSS subscribers. People are crazy not to check your blog daily. I learn so much and am trying to apply as much as possible to the ministry I work with.
Chris,
Thanks so much for that really great compliment…! I love what I do.
john
Great stuff John. Although I basically have my Feedburner settings dialed in, this post helped me tweek a few things. Thanks for your help brother.
word up. pass on the love…!
Nice post! I had most of those settings turned on, but you did encourage me to use a few more. This includes adding a nice lil icon. You've gotten over 1000 subscribers in less than a year? Wow! I suppose some of us are just boring!
Thanks dude! Just trying to keep it real.
Thanks for this post. I loved the Ping-Shot tip. I've turned it on for my blog now!
rock it david!
My feed is broken on wordpress. Is there a way to fix it? Email me if you want the details.
Throw a request in the forums. I'll pick it up there.
I've got at least 15 feeds in FeedBurner and all of them have different settings – was learning as I went. I've got some work to do!
thanks man. pass the love on!
Very thorough and informative. Great info. Thanks for taking the time to do this. I found that I had intuitively set most of my settings to the same as yours but your explanations were extremely helpful. Thanks again.
Nathan,
Sure thing! Thanks for stopping by! Share the love!
Thanks man! I also used most of those things but since you explained some of the ones I was questioning… I'm using them too now! I also added a ChurchCrunch-LoveSquare to the side of my site!
cool man. i'm adding you.
This is a fantastic post. I've taken most of your recommendations, but not quite sure I like what Buzzboost does to my blog posts…
This might have been the most helpful post you've ever shared with us nerds!
sweet! does this mean that all the other posts are pretty lame?
To the YahooPipes ChurchCrunch community bloggers?
yes.
John – top notch bro.
thanks dude. it was fun.
John, this is great stuff. I've learned entirely too much from you about sites and WordPress and blogs. Thanks again.
hehe. you can always take a break…!
Oh Thank you very all these information!
tks man,
was a bit a a marathon session for me to go thru with the type of connectivity we have here, but I am almost all nicely set up – just gotta develop a smaller banner to fit better with the title.
one again shot dude
wow….quite meaty..
should be bite-sized consumable though…
Hi there!
What a great post this is! Thanks so much for sharing. My name is Paula and I blog at http://masterwordsmith-unplugged.blogspot.com and two other sites (both the original feed and feedburner feeds there are validated).
I would like to humbly ask for your advice.
For the past one week, my feeds are very slow in being updated in my friends' blogrolls. Is this a Blogger problem? My feedmedic seems to be ok.
Would appreciate your help and advice.
Thanks a lot.
cheers
Great stuff man — really. I had most of the same settings – but just went through and tweaked things a bit. Thanks for that.
I would love to know why you don't monetize your RSS feeds yet…what are your thoughts on that?
I just went to Feed Validator and it seems that there are some problems with my Feed…don't know why – but good to know:
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/pomomusings/nvbD
Also – a question. So my feed URL is weird: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/pomomusings/nvbD
Something about when I first set it up, made a pomomusings feed and then another one for some reason (pomomusings/nvbD). Would it be really bad if I switched back to the pomomusings/ one (without the nvbD at the end)….? Because wouldn't I lose all the current subscribers?
Adam,
Yes, moving now would lose all your subscribers. You'd have to communicate to all of them to resubscribe to the new feed. It's not necessarily bad, but it's not a very “clean” link. Sad, but not dramatically bad.
I am looking for sponsors for my feeds, which I will be filling soon. Monetizing it with Google Ads… ugh. I've seen it and not sure I want tomove that way. i tried it as well for a bit. ugly.
john
This is one of the best tutorial I have seen. Step by step guidance… visual instructions are always better than simple verbal or textual instructions.
slym,
thanks! pass it around!
While setting up my feedburner account I had activated summary burner, but now I had deactivated it. Inspite of that feedburner is burning summaries and sending across teasers and not the full feed… i don't know what is the problem, can you please help.
reset your feed by doing feed medic.
Hey John
I just read from Pro-blogger that we can now edit the subject line for feedburner feeds. That's one of the newest feature they have. Just in case you want your readers to know.
I have to strongly disagree on Browser Friendly. From my experience and discussions with others, it seems that most of the people using RSS have a bookmarklet or something similar for adding feeds. Personally, getting stopped at that page makes me reconsider subscribing, and many times I don't.
John, this is an excellent post about Feedburner. There were a few things even I didn't know about. On my own blog I did two things to spruce up Feedburner's subscribe box and their BuzzBoost box. I wanted to give these two areas some personality so I even wrote a couple tutorials on how I did it. You can check out both of them here…
http://www.dcblog.net/2008/09/box-up-your-buzzboo…
http://www.dcblog.net/2008/09/customized-feedburn…
Thanks for the detailed article.
I don’t know If I said it already but …Great site…keep up the good work.
I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say I’m glad I found your blog. Thanks, 
A definite great read..Tony Brown
very nice post , thanks
Thanks for the great tutorial! “Feedburner” was not even part of my vocabulary until today. And now my blog is totally on fire!
Thanks for taking the time to post this. It REALLY helped.
sure thing!
Hi there
I came via Blogging with Amy. I followed all your instructions, did what I needed to. The chicklet is happily installed on my blog. But when I validated my feed it didn’t work. I am a bit overwhelmed and not sure what to do. Any help would be appreciated. I am using blogger.
Thanks
ah. blogger. send me a link to your blog.
or… email me: johnsaddington@gmail.com
Feedburner is really very useful for syndicating feeds from other websites..’`
But i want to optimize like http://feeds.feedburner.com/psdtuts
Only default feed !
With Rgds
Thanks for doing all this legwork!
Hello there.
I found your site via bloggingwithamy.com and really like it! I used all of your advice and yet I am still having some problems with Feedburner. I don’t know if you might be able to help, but here goes:
I have a very new site and haven’t really publicized it yet, but I know that I have about 3 people subscribed to my site via email (self, husband and a friend or two) but feedburner shows no subscribers. I think that I added feedsmith successfully yesterday and thought that was the issue, but today it still shows no subscribers.
Also if I check feedburner / ‘publicize’, then ‘Email Subscriptions’, then ‘Subscription Management’.it shows no subscibers and though I selected the option to be notified when someone cancels his subscription, I cancelled mine the other day and got no notification. Granted, I signed up right again to see if the subscription count was working but I assume that I should have gotten a notification.
Do you have any ideas what might be happening?
Thanks much in advance and Merry Christmas!
not sure. I’d have to see it for myself. Sometimes it takes a few minutes to populate.
Hi. I just read this great post because I was looking for a correction to a problem. Perhaps you can answer why my feedburner summary burnmer will not deactivate. Although it says it is deactivated, it is only sending out a bit of the post? Thanks.
This was so helpful. Now way I could have updated my site correctly without this tutorial. Thank you sooo much!!!
This was an unbelievably helpful post. Thank you!
Thank you so much!
I have used your tutorial to check my feeds config.
I had my site at bloggers and migrated to WP with a private server…
Keep it real!
Dee
THANK YOU for this post. It was so informative and helpful! I am in the process of launching a new self-hosted wordpress blog, and after clicking over from bloggingwithamy.com, went through your entire tutorial for my new feed. Only now I think I need to go back through for my other blog, too! I learned so much!!
Thank you so much for all of the tips. Very helpful!
Hello!
I loved this tutorial! I still have a ways to go w/ my new blog, but I used this once when I set it up originally and again while straightening out a problem w/ my feeds.
Anyway, I noticed that you didn’t touch on the Password Protect portion of publicizing the feed. What are your thoughts on this? There is a warning below the setup that states:
Important: This service prevents our Email Subscriptions service from delivering email updates from your feed, and it will also password protect your feed’s content when redisplayed using our Headline Animator graphic. This graphic itself becomes password protected, which is undesirable if you wish to use it to promote your site/feed. Therefore, we recommend not using Headline Animator or Email Subscriptions, and this Password Protector service, with the same feed.
I assume this means that w shouldn’t use it if we are using email subscriptions, right?
Thanks!
I have a new wordpress blog with feedburner. When it says “Copy and Paste the Following Code Into Any Web Page” or “Copy This HTML”…..where to I paste it in my wordpress blog?
http://tentblogger.com/feedburner/ <~~~ check out this post.
Seriously, I’m addicted to your site. Thank you so much for taking the time to walk so many of us through the complicated options that Feedburner has to offer. Kudos to you!
It took this non-techy 2 hours, but I just optimized my feed burner with your awesome step-by-little-baby-step instructions. thanks so much!
found you via bloggingwithamy
I do the same thing. Every time I need to setup a Feedburner feed, I pull this up
Thanks for all the great info! My question is about what my e-mail subscribers get in their inbox, and Feedburner settings are my best guess about where to change it. Currently, the entirety of the post is sent out, but I would like to send only the first 100 words, or so. I’m sure it’s an easy fix, but I just can’t seem to find that option. I use wordpress.org and can’t find anything there, either.
Thanks so much!
Hi –
Do you have any suggestions for troubleshooting the RSS Feeder. I went through the steps to add it and it worked for awhile and then somehow stopped working so I did the tech savvy step and deleted it but when I went back to re-add all I got was an Invalid 404 message that my url was bad for the feeds.
I check the Feedburner forum and it is pretty much not help so can you possibly direct me to a good resource to help troubleshoot. I am a beginner WP user in case you were wondering.
What’s your feed URL?
Hi There!
Love your site!! I have a total newbie question. I have my feed all set up BUT I just don’t get how to get the URL address for my feed in order to enter it into my social widget?
Thanks
Shari
I just started a new blog on WordPress (first new post yesterday!) and am still learning the ropes (I’ve been blogging on Blogger for more than 2 years). Anyway, I have all the settings set to burn “full” feed with feedburner, but my first emails subscription mailing went out today and it was the “summary” version. Is there a setting in WordPress that would cause this?
Look under SETTINGS > READING and switch to full.
Thanks for the “step by step” …you are GREAT!
Thank you so much for this tutorial. I have followed all of your recommendations.
One problem: Yesterday I had the Creative Commons option checked. This morning I noticed that my subscriber feed count went down from 14 (it’s a new blog) to 1. Could the Creative Commons have caused this? I also activated a bunch of new plugins yesterday.
How can I get my true subscriber count to show back up?
Thank you,
Pam
This was a great post – thank you very much for putting it together with the screen shots! I thought I had everything set up all slick-like, but I was missing out on some great stuff. Fantastic – again, thank you.
thanks for the great guide, i’m trying to setup my first feed…so bookmark!
Yeah. I refer to this time to time myself. Hopefully Google won’t end this service like they did Google Reader!
Thank a ton man!!! Really appreciate your work.
This was sooo informative!! Thanks!!!
Thank you so much for this valuable contribution. I’m trying to create my first website. It’ll be a wordpress based blog. And all this is new to me. So thank you!
I just discovered the API Awareness function no longer exists. Do you know what to do instead?
And with Google Reader gone, how should I set up an RSS feed?
It’d be great if you can help me with this. And credits to Amy from bloggingwithamy.com for pointing this out!
Thanks– This is great and very helpful!